I was quite excited when the Solforge Kickstarter was announced. I consider myself a fan of the digital version of Ascension and so was quite interested to see what Stoneblade (previously Gary Games) could do with a purely digital format. Online card games aren’t something new and a slew of them coming out made me interested in the genre as a whole. The deal was sealed when Stoneblade announced that the don of the CCG genre, Richard Garfield was involved I got rather excited. Now imagine my surprise and disappointment when I discover that Solforge is a lane based card game that has already been done to death.

PAX East 2013 is happening right now so news is coming out of thick and fast. As you would expect it's mostly video game related but we've managed to cobble together a News Collider PAX'ed (bu-dum tish) with tabeltop related news.

Do you remember when Games Workshop made board games? Space Hulk, Talisman, Doom of the Eldar (maybe that last one should be ignored)? It seems an age ago now but at one time Games Workshop where the kings of theme based board games. Time has passed and the mantle has been handed on to Fantasy Flight Games, along with many of Games Worksop’s licences and settings. Relic is the latest offering as Fantasy Flight have combined the Warhammer 40,000 universe and Talisman’s game mechanics into an epic space quest to defeat the evils of chaos.

The last News Collider was really just a clearing of the backlog of interesting news titbits. This week is on track with table top gaming news fresher than recently washed a towel doused in lenor. In this week’s news blast we have a re-launched Small World Kickstarter, a release date for Relic and not one but two new Warhammer 40,000 video games announced.

Welcome to the first (of hopefully a regular) of the News Collider, a roundup of interesting tit bits and news to come out of the table top gaming world in the last few weeks. In this round up we go back to look at some older news you may have missed as we look at a new Blood Bowl video game, shiny screenshots from the Space Hulk conversion, a shiny new board game from Gale Force Nine and a Warmachine deck building game.

The Warmachine two player battle-box is a brilliant and cheap way to start playing Warmachine. You get a load of miniatures for the game with some extra units that will take you beyond the faction starter boxes. You’re going to be stuck with small games straight out of the box. This isn’t a bad thing, one of Warmachine’s great strengths is it works so well with just a handful of models as well as larger armies and it allows you to get to grips with the rules. Starting at the 15 point mark you can easily tweak the two armies to suit your needs, but if you want to take your armies to the next level, 25 points, then you’re going to have to expand both armies slightly. Luckily with just a handful of extra models you can take these armies much further.

Space Hulk, considered by many to be a seminal work in theme driven games. Space Hulk, released 3 times with the latest version considered the best ever. Space Hulk, a game now so rare and highly sort after that those copies get sold on eBay for over a £200 even though half the bits are missing and the Blood Angels’ captain has been eaten by the dog. Space Hulk; a game I probably won’t play unless I sell the rest of my board game collection. Death Angel; a card based game that takes the theme and concepts of the original Space Hulk board game and makes a tense co-op game that you can buy for under £20, result!